Ten essays! Why so many? In one issue? The bumper crop of submissions we received for this issue suggests to me that we are doing something right. That, and the fact that two essays from Solstice were selected as “Notable Essays” in Best American Essays this year. That, and the fact that we have snagged, for our Summer issue, the extraordinary essayist, memoirist, and cultural critic Sven Birkerts to judge this year’s Michael Steinberg Prize for Nonfiction.
Each of the essays here… well, we just couldn’t turn these essays away, it’s that simple.
America is at war again. It seems to me that, in America, even when we are at peace we are at war. On June 19th, 1953, during the “Cold” War, Ethel Rosenberg was executed with her husband Julius for passing “atomic secrets” to the Soviet Union. Her only crime seems to have been typing up her husband’s notes of a meeting with a Soviet agent. Nevertheless, the current president’s mentor, Roy Cohn, pressed for her death. Asked for time to make arrangements for her childrens’ care, the court refused. Clearly, “family separation” is not new. Ellen Meeropol’s essay, more than a half-century later, poignantly attests to the ongoing personal loss of her mother-in-law’s absence.
David’s Mura’s essay from Minneapolis, “The ICE Invasion of the Minnesota: Thoughts on the Day of Remembrance,”connects the racism and incarceration of immigrants to the earlier chapter of American concentration camps in which his parents were held during the Second World War. The essay, an earlier version of which appears on LitHub, is written from the streets of Minneapolis, from its gloriously diverse community that has shown us all what resistance to injustice looks like.
Also writing from that besieged city, Jonas Attilus will bring you inside the reality of a Haitian-American physician who must navigate the perils of a frightening and restrictive travel ban, not to mention the racism that it rests upon. “A passport, he writes, “is a government-issued travel document, but lately it has taken on another meaning here in Minneapolis. We do not carry it for the airport. We carry it because of fear. “
Chris Arthur’s essay evinces a curiosity and empathetic wonder that offers a kind of re-set: “How much do our beliefs shape what we see? To what extent does our awareness depend on the raw impress of sensations, and to what extent on how we’ve learned to read and name them?” Leaning on the example of Montaigne, Arthur notes that the 16th century essayist’s original motto, later changed to Que sais-je, or “What do I know?” was Epekho, or “I abstain.”
Eileen Fitzgerald’s “Buy Nothing” echoes that response to the chaotic and demanding world. Akin to Bartleby’s “I prefer not to,” the commitment to buy nothing, or at least as little as possible, turns out to be a way to build community that is much more effective, and gratifying, than the mere exchange of money.
In her profound meditation on breasts and motherhood and mortality, Sarah Harley takes us to the very center of womanhood. “Even as a girl,” she writes, “I sensed how women’s bodies were a spectacle.”
Rosann Tung “interrogates all that was cringy” about the international adoption system, particularly the adoption of girls from China. She bravely engages with questions of relative wealth, racism, assimilation, as she probes the emotional reality of this complex parenting for her and her daughter.
Jacqui Higgins-Dailey in “Mirrors and Mazes” unfolds the many possible ways to understand — and to withstand — migraines. “Understanding that migraine is more of a state of being than simply a few hours of pain,” she writes, “is unthinkable for many.” It will no longer be unthinkable to readers of her compelling essay.
Sher Kehila reminds us in her fine essay, “Haunting Grounds” that languages are repositories, and that one’s mother tongue contains one’s people, their understandings, their ways of being in the world, their ghosts. It’s an original, exploratory, exciting inquiry into the nature of knowing itself.
How are an eclipse, a cemetery, and an astronaut connected? You’ll have to read Don Lago’s exquisite and lyrical essay to find out. Then you’ll no doubt read it again for the sheer beauty of the prose and the wonder, at both cosmos and humanity, that it conveys and celebrates.
These essayists meet the world with eyes wide open, witnessing, reflecting, dissenting, weighing, and wondering. Their example shows us how to stay engaged during a dark time, how to remain in meaning-making mode, how to survive brutality and cruelty and reach for connection with others. We are proud to offer them to you.
— Richard Hoffman
Richard Hoffman is the author of nine books, including the memoirs Half the House and Love & Fury; the story collection Interference and other stories; the essay collection Remembering the Alchemists and other essays; and five books of poems: Without Paradise; Gold Star Road, which won the 2006 Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and the New England Poetry Club’s Sheila Motton Book Award; Emblem; Noon until Night, winner of the 2018 Massachusetts Book Award for poetry; and People Once Real.
